The New Age

What it is

A loose, decentralised body of practice and belief that coalesced in the 1970s and peaked commercially in the 1980s and 90s, with no founder, no scripture, no membership and no agreed boundaries.

Its recurring elements:

• The self is divine, and spiritual work is the recovery of that knowledge rather than submission to anything outside
• Direct experience over doctrine — what works for you is the criterion
• Holism — mind, body and spirit as one system, and the individual as continuous with the whole
• Energy as a universal explanatory principle
• Reincarnation and karma, generally in a therapeutic rather than a soteriological form
• Channelled teaching as a source of authority
• Eclecticism — material taken from anywhere and combined freely

Where it came from

The name is astrological: the Age of Aquarius, the coming precessional age. Theosophists and Alice Bailey were using "New Age" in this sense from the early twentieth century, long before the counterculture picked it up.

The actual ingredients are older and mostly American:

• Theosophy (1875) supplied the framework — karma, reincarnation, ascended masters, the astral body, and the practice of importing Asian vocabulary into Western occultism.
• New Thought (1880s) supplied the mind-over-matter machinery: thought as causative, health and prosperity as functions of belief. This is the single largest debt and the least acknowledged.
• Spiritualism supplied mediumship, which became channelling.
• Jung, filtered heavily, supplied archetypes, synchronicity and the language of individuation.
• The human potential movement — Esalen from 1962, encounter groups, Maslow, Rogers — supplied the therapeutic idiom and the assumption that spiritual work is work on the self.
• The 1960s counterculture supplied the audience, the Asian teachers, and the psychedelics.

The commercial phase was the 1980s: Shirley MacLaine's Out on a Limb (1983) and its television adaptation, crystals, the Harmonic Convergence of 1987, and a very large publishing industry.

How it is practised

Individually and eclectically — meditation, crystals, tarot, astrology, energy healing, workshops, retreats, books. There is no membership, so there is no practice everyone shares.

What we can and cannot say

We can say almost nobody uses the term about themselves now, and this is the key fact about its present state. "New Age" became a pejorative in the 1990s — associated with credulity, with affluence, and with a particular kind of self-absorption — and practitioners moved to other labels: spiritual but not religious, conscious, holistic, or simply nothing at all. The content did not go away; the word did.

We can say the historical claims are mostly wrong, and this is where the site can be genuinely useful. Practices routinely presented as ancient, Egyptian, Atlantean, Vedic or Native American are usually traceable to a specific nineteenth-century American or British source, often within one or two removes. Crystal healing is not ancient. Chakra colour systems in their familiar form are largely twentieth-century Western. The law of attraction is New Thought. These are checkable facts, and checking them is not hostility.

We can say the scholarly assessment is more interesting than the popular one. Wouter Hanegraaff's New Age Religion and Western Culture (1996) argues it is best understood as the secularisation of Western esotericism — old occult material rewritten in the vocabulary of psychology and science, for people who no longer accept religious authority but have not stopped wanting what religion provided. That is a serious analysis and it explains a great deal, including why the movement is so attached to scientific-sounding language.

We can say the criticisms from within are the sharpest. Practitioners and teachers themselves raised the problems of spiritual bypassing, of cultural appropriation, of the "you create your own reality" claim's cruelty to the sick and the poor, and of the movement's comfort with wealth. The best critiques of the New Age are not from sceptics.

And we can say it changed the mainstream permanently. Yoga, meditation, mindfulness in hospitals and schools, the language of energy and intention, the wellness industry, the assumption that spirituality is individual and chosen rather than inherited — these are now ordinary, and they came through this movement. It did not fail; it dissolved into the culture.

We cannot say the New Age is one thing, because it never was. What can be said is that its lineage is documented, that the lineage is not the one it claims, and that its influence outlived its name.

Further reading

• Wouter Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture (1996).
• Paul Heelas, The New Age Movement (1996).
• Olav Hammer, Claiming Knowledge (2001), on how these traditions construct authority.